Member Since: 5/16/2012
Posts: 12,486
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Billboard's 10 Defining Artists of the 2010s (So Far)
10. Kendrick Lamar
9. Arcade Fire
8. Katy Perry
7. Lady Gaga
6. Nicki Minaj
5. Drake
4. Taylor Swift
3. Adele
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People deride the Grammys' best new artist category for occasionally whiffing on artists who burned bright for only a small amount of time, but the voting committee sure looks smart for handing Adele the trophy over artists like the Jonas Brothers and Duffy in 2009. Back then, Adele was a rising star; with her 2011 sophomore album 21, that star exploded into a mega-selling supernova, a cultural force responsible for instant classics like "Rolling in the Deep," "Someone Like You" and "Set Fire to the Rain," songs that don't sound much like each other but are tied together by the voice of a generation. Adele technically defined only one year of the past five, but that run was so dominant and universally beloved that we are now helplessly waiting for the next one to arrive.
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2. Kanye West
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How many times has Kanye West changed the game? Last decade, he had "Stronger" and 808s & Heartbreak, which helped create entire sub-genres. In the '10s, he set the template for ambitious album-length statements: Without My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, other seminal, highly acclaimed full-lengths like Drake's Take Care and Beyonce's Beyonce would not and could not exist. And before DJ Mustard's lean beats dominated pop, rap and R&B radio in 2014, Kanye was already preaching the virtues of hard-hitting minimalism with Yeezus. Most artists slow down as they get older; Kanye only seems to get more relevant.
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1. Beyonce
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What does it mean to define a musical era? For us, it means to bend the universe of the medium toward you, to become the star that every other entity is forced to orbit. In the first half of the 2010s, no artist possessed that amount of control more than Beyonce, who destroyed the rules and wrote new ones on the fly with her 2013 "visual album" Beyonce. Bey toppled the industry's plane by dropping an instant-classic full-length with no prior warning, selling hundreds of thousands of copies within less than a week, redefining her crowd-pleasing sound and putting out over a dozen visuals that kept our jaws squarely on the floor. The release and content of Beyonce would be enough to bolt this author onto this list, but consider all of the other moments Beyonce enjoyed since 2010: the release of 4, perhaps the most underrated R&B of the 2010s; the Mrs. Carter tour and co-headlining stadium stint with her husband, Jay Z; a Super Bowl performance that reunited Destiny's Child, and a show-stopping finale at the 2014 VMAs; and the line "Strong enough to bear the children/Then get back to business," which she followed by… bearing a child, then getting back to business. Nobody's perfect, but Beyonce is just about as flawless as they come -- and in the 2010s, the rest of the music world was simply trying (and failing) to keep up with her.
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Did you fave make the list?
All blurbs: http://www.billboard.com/articles/co...f-2010s-so-far
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